Liveable life,educational theory and the imperative of constant change

Abstract

This article is based on a keynote paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), University College UCC, Copenhagen, 22–25 August, 2017. In this paper, I problematise the idea that we live in an era of constant change with respect to education and educational research. I claim that what presents itself as change on supra-national as well as national levels, or even in classrooms, more often than not has to do with adjustments within a given reality rather than of a radical and profound change of this same reality. The response to this situation I will suggest is to mobilise radical forms of theory that address the inherent emancipatory and transformational character of education. This kind of theory, I argue, actually also addresses the central characteristics of a truly pluralistic democracy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler the paper will lay out some arguments for resisting an anti-democratic and anti-pluralistic tendency within what I will call ‘pre-Sophist’ educational trends and instead promote an education that is concerned with a ‘liveable life’ for all.

Introduction

In the following I problematise the idea that we live in an era of constant change with respect to education and educational research. Instead I argue that what we are witnessing today is a rapid adjustment under a kind of authoritarian capitalism, limiting not only the idea of change, but also the very possibility of education and democracy. What presents itself as constant change more often than not has to do with adjustments within a given reality than of a radical and profound change of this same reality. In the first part of this paper I will therefore mobilise radical forms of theory and discuss the first educational theory in the western world that introduced radical thought. Here I will explore the fact that educational theory comes into the world as a break with reproduction of class privilege through education and claims the possibility that anyone can be the bearer of culture and society. That educational theory is constituted as a break with class reproduction and therefore as radical change is counter to those educational trends that tend to support elite schooling in different forms. Therefore, as I will be developing in the third section, educational theory and research are particularly susceptible to critique whenever the general public discourse takes an authoritarian turn. When such critique is severe it also means that the idea of education as radical change is also in trouble. In the last section of the paper I will give an example of what I call an educational impulse. Such an impulse is a way of understanding what is educational within education, and which lets us experience a particular form of freedom within the educational act. It is freedom as expressed through the possibility of a liveable life for all beyond reproduction of (class) privilege through education. The strategy I advocate throughout the article, then, is to realise the power of educational theory itself and through such realisation support radical change in all situations of education. This is particularly important, I will conclude, because the educational impulse is also what keeps a pluralistic democracy alive.

Problematising the imperative of constant change rhetoric

Despite that we all share an interest in education, we also understand that word so differently, depending not only on diverse educational systems, formed differently in relation to national, historical, social and political circumstances (which therefore shapes the research about them differently) but also that we all belong to diverse theoretical traditions forming our very understanding of what education is all about. I will therefore work through my argument beginning with the very first educational theory in western democratic civilisation and, from this starting point, make some distinctions and define key concepts in order to discuss what I mean regarding the possibility of real change in and through education, beyond the imperative of constant change.

The imperative of constant change speaks foremost of a strategy of reproduction of the state, by the state, even as the state is set under ‘transnational reform pressure from such supra national agents as OECD and EU, and in higher education the Bologna process’ (ECER, 2017). However, any government in any country, as Tomas Popkewitz (2008) has pointed out, is first and foremost reproducing itself in order to stay in power. That means that if the people in its diversity is not represented by the state in full, the people would have other interests and ideas about what constant change entails, beyond being a strategy for self-reproduction of the state. That is, ‘the people’ in a democracy is something more than that which is ultimately in the service of reproducing state power; ‘the people’ is also a way of talking about the possibility for anyone to appear as an embodied voice on the stage on which we all live (this will be developed further throughout the paper). This is a point also made by Judith Butler when she states that

the conditions of democratic rule depend […] on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order, but which is the condition of its democratic character. (Butler, 2015: 162)

The state as such cannot logically be a guarantee of profound change since its interest in self-preservation overrules its interest in change – meaning that the state rather has an interest in using a limited idea of change for its constant self-realisation (see also Rancière, 1995). This idea or imperative of constant change then can rather be understood as Nicholas Rose (1996) and Jacques Rancière (2004) have pointed out, for example, as a ‘technique’ or ‘police order’ for a successive adjustment to a framework of self-realisation rather than a breaking out from it. The role of educational theory in relation to such a framework then, is to seriously question the limiting effects on educational change and to introduce the possibility of real or profound change into the states’ as well as societies’ and cultures’ reproductive powers by insisting on educational theory as necessary foundation for education in any given state.

This means in my view that educational theory can never be entirely at the service of the state. Its role and function are rather to be a reminder of the need for what some have called ‘constant revolution’, or what I call an educational impulse, in order for a sound democracy to be realised at all. For me this means that freedom from state oppression or goodwill is not only a political necessity in order to make change possible but also necessary for educational theory to exist at all. Educational theory, as I will show through a brief reading of the very first educational theory in western democratic culture, contributes to the possibility of profound change to a state’s reproductive powers.

I think it is also appropriate in this context to point out that the imperative of constant change doesn’ t seem to have changed that much when it comes to who mostly benefits from our educational systems. As the sociologists of education keep reminding us, and have convincingly showed again and again, school systems all over Europe essentially are reproducing an elite but also at the same time produce precarious lives; they show that there is a growing gap between those who can produce and consume and those who are left outside the productive part of society and the benefits this brings (Lynch, 2006; Lauder et al., 2012). In most European cities there are growing areas of precarious populations in unsafe social housing that all too easily burns down, that are without proper security and protection in their homes and communities. Also, even countries which have embraced the need for ‘a school for all’ still essentially tend to reproduce successful and unsuccessful consumers very much in line with a class-based structure of society. That individuals can move positions within those structures, as the liberal motivation for an equal opportunity educational system claims, does not seem to have changed the basic division between those elites who have power and wealth and those precarious lives who do not have such power. Rather, what we have witnessed (as Judith Butler, 2015; Jacques Rancière, 2017; and economists such as Thomas Piketty, 2013 have pointed out) is a rapid increase in inequality as well as an increased concentration of wealth and power for the very few over the last decade. So, in that sense there has been a real change taking place, but not in line with what educational theory and democracy would require, but rather a full speed adjustment under a kind of authoritarian capitalism masked as the imperative of constant change. Such change, I suggest, is not at all about a liveable life for all but rather only for some at the expense of others.

The imperative of constant change therefore undermines the idea of education having valuable meaning and is as such rather an expression of a certain exercise of power. It is therefore important, I think, to restore the idea of change and freedom as absolutely central for educational theory as well as democracy and a liveable life for all. My paper is a humble attempt to contribute to such restoration and commitment. I will do that by identifying what it is that makes education, education in the first place.

In the following section, I will briefly touch upon the insights of the very first educational theory in western democratic culture proposed by the Sophists in order to discuss what I will call the educational impulse, enabling change and freedom. This impulse, I will suggest, functions in the same way as what Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2015) called a ‘touchstone’: that is, it is the stone that allows one to test if the metal rubbed against it is really gold. That is education, without this touchstone of educational impulse, can be many things but it cannot be grounded in educational theory per se. So, the strategy I suggest, in order to resist, or rather move beyond the oppressive authoritarian capitalism masked as the imperative of constant change under which we live, is to stress and to insist on the historical task of educational theory as infusing the possibility of profound change into a state’s reproductive powers, and to claim the possibility of real educational change in all societies calling themselves democratic.

Education, pedagogik and areté

The Swedish discipline of pedagogik is not a direct translation of the English term education, even though it most certainly has a common source in the ancient Greek concept of paideia, or more precisely in the idea of areté. History and politics, of course, has modelled areté differently in different countries and times but it is very difficult, not to say impossible, to think of education without the Greek concept areté: that is the idea that culture is embodied in and by the acts of people and reflected in their interactions which, combined together, makes up society. That is, areté for the Greeks signalled the very embodiment of the freedom of enacting culture as the way in which one lives and forms one’s life in tune with society. For the Greeks, the perfection of areté meant to be living within a totality of universe, society, body and soul and through this embody the freedom to act as long as this wholeness was not challenged (see Jaeger, 1939).

Areté was, prior to the Sophists, entirely an affair for the aristocracy, who were considered to be already in possession of all the qualities needed to fully comprehend Greek culture and society; hence education was about realising those inner abilities and perfecting them. For the Sophist, areté was entirely about the ability to shape politics and spoke ‘foremost to intellectual power and oratorical ability’, says Jaeger (1939: 291).

The very start of educational theory in 500 BCE promoted this idea in the most profound way imaginable, according to Werner Jaeger (1939). The very aim of education according to this new theory ‘was to transcend the aristocratic principle of privileged education, which [had] made it impossible for anyone to acquire areté unless he already possessed it by inheritance from his divine ancestors’ (Jaeger, 1939: 287).

The Sophists argued instead that areté was not and could not be a birth right of the aristocracy, it was not something one had inside oneself and that could only being brought out and perfected by education, – it was instead something that one was offered as a gift from the outside, which was added to one’s person (subject) through education, changing one’s personhood (subjectification). In this way it was therefore accessible and in reach for anyone. Areté is the realisation of a process of living in wholeness that anyone can embrace, embodying the moral, political and aesthetical insights represented by Greek culture and society.

An interesting historical circumstance is that the early Sophists themselves, according to Jaeger, did not belong to the aristocracy, and were despised by Plato for ‘teaching anything to anyone’, and for the very indecency of actually being paid for it! To me this sounds as if it were the Sophists who were the first teachers and not Plato/Socrates as is often claimed, since while Socrates through Plato is modelling the ideal philosopher as teacher, the one who teaches for teaching itself; the Sophist teacher teaches in order to be able to live and eat.

Anyhow, the idea of the possibility of teaching anything to anyone is, as far as I understand it, an absolutely revolutionary one and opens up the possibility, in our time, that anyone regardless of social class, gender or age can embody culture as the way one lives one’s life. The revolutionary thing is, I think, and this is important for the discussion today, that Jaeger claims that this radical idea of ‘teaching anything to anyone’ is the foundation for the very first educational theory in western culture and is necessary for any idea of profound change. That is, one cannot think educational theory, following Jaeger, without also implying the possibility for anyone to embody areté through education, so as to embody the ethical, political and aesthetical insight that moves culture and society ahead as well as at times changing its course. As such the idea of educational theory, according to the Sophists, very much resembles the idea that democracy essentially breaks into history as a scandal; it allows letting anyone become the bearer of the future of society. Thus it is not only a certain class that is in charge, but anyone without exception, as Jacques Rancière (2004) claims. Jaeger (1939) claims that without this idea, brought to history by the Sophists, it would simply not be possible to think of democracy at all, since the Sophists’ idea of education opens up the fundamental change and freedom needed in order to be able to direct the course of culture and history (Säfström, accepted). Education then, from this view, has no external relation to democracy. It is rather the case that there is no democracy at all without this idea of education at its centre. Education is the very praxis by which society and culture exist as democratic, as something other than the total atrocity of dictatorship, or authoritarianism.

If it is the case that educational theory is about the possibility of change and freedom for everyone, it is also clear that whenever the possibility of fundamental change and freedom are in trouble, educational theory will equally be in severe trouble. Equally, if it is the case that educational research argues that areté for everyone is under attack, it means that central values and conditions for democracy are also under attack. And this is certainly the case in Europe today in which, among other things, the pressure from national as well as supranational agents to make research more ‘science-based’ often means reducing research to an adjunct of efficiency measures for school systems (Biesta, 2010). And these moves are increasingly taking place in a political context in which different versions of fascism are on the rise (again), with populist parties taking seats in parliaments (see Arnstad, 2016).

I am not saying that the only reason for the authoritarian turn in public life is the discrediting of educational thought, but rather that the discrediting taking place is an obvious sign of the turn. A society in which democratic values still have a profound impact on the course of things means that education in that society is informed by the idea of areté as ‘teaching anything for anyone’. However, many if not all European countries today instead promote an education and school system severely diminished by economic (neo)liberalism in combination with nationalistic dogmas. Within this framework, change means successive adjustments to the conditions already set by authoritarian capitalism rather than being about the idea of constant revolution so central for a living democracy. So, the motivation for me to try to contribute to the restoration of the original radicalism of educational theory at the heart of democracy is certainly driven by the growing need to defend a decent public life today as well as arguing for a commitment to profound change beyond the ‘imperative of constant change’ rhetoric.

The shaming and blaming of teachers

Over the last 10–15 years we have witnessed profound attacks on education and educational research in Sweden, but not only in Sweden; the same applies, for example, in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Poland and England, among others, and is largely a European phenomenon, if not a global problem (Säfström and Saeverot, 2017; Krejsler, 2017; Thompsson, 2009; Szkudlarek, 2017; Biesta, 2010). In Sweden, as well as Norway and Germany among others, this is evident in its most obvious form: through the shaming and blaming of teachers in the eyes of the public in order to increase control over every part of education (Elstad, 2009; Hood, 2010). The idea of the right-wing governments ¹ seems to be that the de-professionalisation of teachers as well as increased control over educational research by the state will lead to a more controlled reproduction of the means by which a society can compete economically in the global market. Moreover, these moves also function to better control the public by introducing education as a limited possibility of change within the existing order of things. In a way this strategy of right-wing governments resembles the pre-Sophist idea of understanding education and teaching as the tool by which one can extract certain abilities from within people who basically already have them. The pre-Sophists believed that those inner abilities were to be found exclusively within the aristocracy, while particularly the right-wing governments of today believe education is for bringing out the talents of an exclusive elite ² .

I still think it is fair to say, even if it may sound a bit blunt, that European school systems are increasingly formed through educational policies heavily influenced by up-to-date, ideological versions of the natural selection of the fittest (see, for example, Pietrandrea et al., 2018). Even though they tend to have more fancy names, as for example grammar schools in the UK, and ‘free’ schools in Sweden, nonetheless they still reflect an increased elitism of education. In any case, the distribution of what and who is valued in the liberal democratic societies of today is leaving a vast part of the population behind, mostly reproducing an elite legitimised through their supposedly innate intelligence and socially preferred sets of abilities, which are confirmed by schooling and matched by values circulating in capitalist economies. In this way, schools are geared toward making the individual a successful and valuable asset in consumerist societies.

A liveable life for all

Judith Butler (2015) shows how elites not only have been successful in accumulating capital and power but also that the very fabric of liberal democratic societies are eroding as a consequence. She exemplifies this by referring to the distinction military strategists make between the valuable and defendable part of the population, on the one hand, and the disposable part of the population on the other. That is to say, what Butler claims to be operating in today’s liberal democracies is an idea of the people that does not represent the whole of the population within any given country. In other words, it is not only the case, if we follow Butler, that the expressions of nationalism and racism in our respective countries, as well as the appearance of precarious populations, can be understood as a problem that merely exists on the surface of what is basically a healthy liberal democracy. Rather, the very condition of this liberal democracy is to demarcate certain people as being outside the foundation of that democracy, as not really or fully being part of the society in which they live. It seems as if the people today is fundamentally and increasingly so, understood as being equivalent to those elites who already, and always already, are included in any given nation as its most valuable asset for economic growth and competition. This is also, I would say, if not the only reason, at least an important part of why fascism has re-entered history in Europe as a disturbingly violent reality, because as long as we do not understand the entire population as worthy to defend, and view parts of it as disposable, we are already in practice making fascist claims.

This is also why Chantal Mouffe (2017) argues that the left needs a populist politics in which populism is understood as the making of a people, but a people endlessly diverse in its variations and expression. In a similar vein, Judith Butler (2015) talks about a liveable life for all as a life in which the right for all to appear as a bodily visible part of the people means to be able to rightfully and actually claim a valuable life in society (regardless of social class, ethnicity, sexuality or gender), which is endlessly valuable for any formulation of the people. That is, a life that in any and all circumstances is defendable is necessary for democracy to exist at all, in the classroom as well as all other parts of society. Education or teaching as the expression of a liveable life has to include the possibility of real change in order for teaching to be an expression of democracy in every moment of its existence. I am not discussing teaching for or about democracy, rather that embedded within the very idea of ‘teaching anything to anyone’ is the very exercise of democracy, since it is not only in the service of an elite. That is, I understand our challenge today, as researchers, as teachers and as intellectuals of education, is to try to formulate strategies in order to be able to defend and commit ourselves to the revolutionary idea the Sophists brought to life: that areté is not and cannot be a birth right of an aristocracy, an inner ability of a certain class of people, but can only be acquired from the ‘outside’ through education and the act of teaching and is therefore in reach of the entire population.

To formulate strategies that release education from the grip of class-based elitism cannot only concern claiming the role of teaching as leading the child or the citizen to learn the kind of knowledge that would liberate the student from oppressive forces. This is because education as the practice of leading someone to knowledge faces at least two problems, as Jacques Rancière (1991) has pointed out. First, the idea of leading someone else to knowledge seems to suggest that one cannot find knowledge by oneself; that is, the learner of knowledge is made dependent upon a leader rather than finding out for themself. And as such education as a practice of leading someone else to knowledge is also about the reproduction of a certain hierarchical relation in which the leader already and always inhabits the superior position, resulting in a continuous subordination of the ones who are lead, basically reproducing the existing authoritarian social order.

Second, the idea that education would primarily be about leading someone to knowledge seems to imply that the learner owns no valuable knowledge themself, that true knowledge is always out of reach and that only the leader, or the Master teacher as Rancière says, can identify the path to that true knowledge. It is the idea of Socrates as essentially already being in possession of the answer to the questions he keeps asking, forcing his pupil or adversary to come to an insight already anticipated by Socrates, and which therefore keeps Socrates in absolute power throughout the pedagogical exercise. I cannot therefore understand the idea that education, as the practice of leading someone to knowledge, is particularly helpful in counteracting the impact of authoritarian capitalism. Education as a practice, or as a theory of a practice of leading someone else to knowledge, does not seem to emphasise enough that freedom from hierarchical relations is necessary for educational change to actually take place and for democracy to emerge.

An educational impulse

Instead of viewing educational theory as mainly a theory of a certain practice of one sort or another, I would like to suggest that we consider educational change as being dependent on a teaching informed by what I will call an educational impulse. It is an impulse in the sense that it is not predominantly based in rationality, but rather in the aesthetic formation of the senses. As such, an educational impulse is not possible to determine in terms of a certain content nor is it possible to pin down in advance of a teaching situation: it is not owned in that sense, and thus cannot be capitalised or controlled in full. Its very nature of being an impulse adds a certain sense of freedom from ownership.

In order to exemplify what I mean by the educational impulse, I’d like to draw a parallel with a musical motif explained to me by Ola Karlsson, a professor at the Royal School of Music in Stockholm and the first cellist of the Swedish Radio Symphonic Orchestra. This musical motif in fact is what makes music into music in the first place and resembles the way in which I understand teaching.

According to Karlsson, that which makes music into music is entirely dependent on the breath needed in order for movement to become sound in the way the bow touches the strings on the cello, or the way the conductor moves his baton, or how the horn also needs another kind of breathing than just the blowing of air through the instrument. What is required is a kind of hesitation, an opening up of a space in which the breath literarily creates the music. A symphony orchestra, says Karlsson, can be understood as a lung, as breathing music into existence from nowhere else than the rhythmic intake of air. The conductor moves their baton, breathing into every move themself, a split second ahead of the musicians, opening the very space in which the breathing of the musicians is allowed to enter into the mechanics of playing the instruments and thereby to make music. And moreover, the tonal system as the cellist said, itself exact in its mathematical precision, holds within itself tones and intervals that open up for the possibility of endless variations. Some intervals was considered dangerous when discovered and introduced into the history, such as the interval tritonus, also called the small quint, which was forbidden by the church in the 16^th century, and was deemed the Devil’s interval. But the small quint was also the interval that Bach learned to master in full in the 17^th century, as well as being the most common in blues up to this day.

So what does this tell us about teaching? I would say that the educational impulse also comes from nowhere but functions like a breath of life into the techniques of teaching, introducing a particular kind of emptiness, opening up a space in which it is possible to make education; to breath life into education, as Sharon Todd (2013) has said in another context, means to open that space in which a liveable life for all can take actual and concrete form in the classroom. The stillness, produced by the breath, introduces a necessary freedom from the forces of power in the instruction itself which is needed in order for someone to be able to take their place and emerge as an embodied voice on the moving scene of a classroom on the stage on which we all live. Without this hesitation or stillness in breathing no education is possible at all – just manipulation. The possibility of endless change contained but not repressed within the tonal system is an expression of an ambiguity in the face of its exactness, introducing an insight that there is no content complete in itself and that there is always an escape from totalitarian systems and claims.

There is nothing already given when it comes to making music, neither as a realisation of a talent inside the musician nor as a perfection of a technique. Neither does the conductor function as a dictator dictating true music to take form. It is simply not possible to dictate music, it can only be prepared for so it may arrive. And when it occasionally does arrive it creates wholeness in which each and everyone matters through his or her individual breath. Breathing is that which we all share, at the same time, as it is by necessity our own.

Education, like music, cannot be forced upon anyone. It is an impulse that only can be received in the form of a gift and which occasionally opens up that space in which a liveable life is able to take concrete form, within or outside classrooms, shared by everyone at the same time as it is by necessity our own valuable life that arrives, that appears on the moving scene in which we are implicated, as Dewey (1966) says. The educational impulse welcomes all of us, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class or age, to participate in the creation of a public that is for anyone, the entire population involved and not just a self-righteous elite in its making. As such it is beyond the imperative of constant change rhetoric but all about real educational change.

Concluding thoughts

What educational theory brings to the table, I think, is the recognition and verification of an educational impulse introducing radical change within self-referencing frameworks. As such educational theory is counter to all reproductive forces of class privilege or other ways of restricting education, such as the promotion of elite schooling in whatever form it might take. Education as radical change makes life liveable for anyone in any given nation or country. This also means that radical change is not ‘constant’ at all; it rather happens occasionally and at the precise moment in which the freedom of a liveable life manifests itself in the face of its impossibility in the concrete setting of a classroom, or elsewhere. The educational impulse interrupts the reproductive privilege of the few by breaking out of self-referencing frameworks reflective of ‘pre-Sophist’ educational ideas. In other words, the educational impulse is, as I understand it, a precise way in which educational theory understands and qualifies the radical change of power relations necessary for a truly pluralistic democracy to take concrete form.